Scheduling or “calendaring” multiple events, e.g., meetings, conference calls, etc., across an enterprise may be an extremely challenging task. For example, in the financial industry, events may be internally generated, i.e., arise from inside the enterprise. Internal events might include, for example, meetings about a particular industry, conference calls about a particular stock, etc. Events might also be externally generated, for example, Treasury Department announcements such as production numbers, corporate quarterly earnings reviews, etc.
Presently, multiple calendaring applications are frequently used in corporate environments. Unfortunately, some or all of these applications may be incompatible, thus forcing the user to manually update the applications, clear conflicts, etc. It would be desirable to provide a calendaring application which avoids unnecessary manual updates or coordination among different calendaring applications. It would also be desirable to provide an enterprise-wide calendar in addition to individual calendars, allowing enterprises to track, update, and schedule a number of different types of events and activities.
In certain industries, calendaring technology takes on added complexity because of security, privacy and confidentiality requirements. For example, in the financial industry, not all users may be authorized to view all or even most events. Therefore, effective calendaring technology must implement proper security levels for event information access. Moreover, security regulations may require appropriate review of content before dissemination, as well as observance of appropriate regulations for dissemination. Thus single point of entry calendaring would be desirable to assist in proper security measures and maintain data integrity.
Additionally, it may be necessary to notify external users, such as clients, of certain events. Effective calendaring technology must properly interface with external users while always obeying various security requirements. For example, some external clients may be invited to a number of events, as they are high-priority clients of the enterprise. Others may have lesser priority levels. These levels must be taken into account by the calendaring technology. It would be desirable if user entitlement technology could be used, for example, to automatically implement appropriate priority levels.
Additionally, the use of filtering technology would be desirable as well. The customization afforded by filter technology could provide users with desired views and data. Predetermined or preformatted views would be helpful as well as they would desirably provide the user with automatically implemented data. For example, predetermined views offering daily, weekly or monthly views would provide the user with simple methods of receiving the appropriate data.
Calendaring technology should also interface with other information resources. For example, it would be beneficial if links to research and other databases were implemented so that a user could “drill down” into any research or other information about an event or the topic of an event.
Calendaring technology should also desirably capture and report on data, by implementing data capture of user interactions, user trends, and any other desired information. Data capture and reporting could be extremely useful to determine marketing and sales targeting, refine product offerings, resource allocations, etc.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide apparatus, methods and articles of manufacture for constructing and maintaining a single source calendaring interface.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide apparatus, methods and articles of manufacture for constructing and maintaining a single source calendaring interface with streamlined input.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide apparatus, methods and articles of manufacture for constructing and maintaining a single source calendaring interface with security features.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide apparatus, methods and articles of manufacture for constructing and maintaining a single source calendaring interface with user entitlement features.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide apparatus, methods and articles of manufacture for constructing and maintaining a single source calendaring interface with filtering features.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide apparatus, methods and articles of manufacture for constructing and maintaining a single source calendaring interface with interfaces to existing calendaring and scheduling applications as well as other data sources.